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Hegelianism

Hegel And Anglo-american Philosophy



During the second half of the nineteenth century, Hegel's ideas began exercising considerable influence on several British and American philosophers, notably Edward Caird, F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, and John McTaggart. For them, Hegel provided the vantage point from which they could criticize the empiricism and metaphysical atomism of the utilitarians. Both Russell and Moore also began in this tradition, and their break from—and response to—it in the early 1900s marks the beginning of Anglophone "analytic" philosophy.



Despite continued interest in Hegel's thought, the main stream of Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century tended to be hostile to Hegel because of his opaque style of writing and his alleged willingness to compromise the absoluteness of the law of noncontradiction. Popper's view of Hegel as one of the sources of modern totalitarianism and nationalism was also very influential in the Anglo-American world (though it is now known that unlike Kant, Hegel was despised by the Nazis).

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the animosity toward Hegel among "analytic" philosophers abated. Works by Charles Taylor, H. S. Harris, Terry Pinkard, and Robert Pippin, among others, have helped to revive interest in Hegel's thought, and many of these efforts have attempted to present a "critical" rather than metaphysical interpretation of Hegel. Pippin, for example, develops an account of Hegel's idealism that stresses its indebtedness to Kant while noting the ways in which Hegel's emphasis on history and society advance Kant's critical project. Also, in recent works both John McDowell and Robert Brandom have begun the process of what McDowell calls the "domestication" of Hegel's idealism in the service of developing an alternative to naturalist accounts of cognition and intentionality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beiser, Frederick C., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Includes a detailed and categorized bibliography.

Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W. Wood and translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

——. The Encyclopedia Logic, with the Zusätze: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze. Translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchtig, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991.

——. Gesammelte Werke—Kritische Ausgabe. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft im Verbindung mit Rheinische-westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Hamburg, Germany: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1968–. The critical edition of Hegel's works. New volumes are published every few years.

——. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon 1977.

Hyppolite, Jean. Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974.

Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Assembled by Raymond Queneau, edited by Allan Bloom, and translated by James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969. An abridged translation of the French text.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Translated by Jason Smith and Steven Miller. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Pippin, Robert. Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self- Consciouness. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Yitzhak Y. Melamed

Peter Thielke

Additional topics

Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Habit memory: to HeterodontHegelianism - Marxist Hegelianism, Hegel In France, Hegel And Anglo-american Philosophy, Bibliography